His issue was that we is presented with a string of numbers. The string contains sets of nine numbers. The first 7 represented dollars and the last 2 of each set represented cents. He needed a total. We just finished talking about string manipulation in class so I went at it. Here you go Matt!

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Today in my PowerShell class, we played with the WhenChanged attribute in Active Directory. We were looking at is as part of a question on PowerShell.com. The IT Pro needed to know when an object was last changed. While doing some research, I came across some accounts that the WhenChanged property is only replicated on Global Catalogs, and not the ADDS database. In my testing on Windows Server 2012 R2, replication of this date/time value was replicating on both GCs and non GCs. Getting the most recent value is easy then.

Get-ADUser-Filter{Name-eq"ABC34"}-PropertiesWhenChanged

The problem here is that this will only reflect the last time stamp of the Domain Controller that you are currently pulling information from. In an AD environment with multiple Sites, the default replication interval is 3 hours. If sites are logically chained together, that means that an update made 2 or 3 sites away from you may not get replicated to you for many hours.

The code below will query each of your Domain Controllers for the most recent WhenChanged attribute on a user account. Just remember, this is coded to hit all of them. In a larger environment, you may want to be careful and restrict the DCs that are queried.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

I know that I answered this one once before, but the question popped up again. I’m in North Carolina working with IT Pros with the states public school system. We did a full installation and configuration of Windows Server 2012 R2 Core yesterday. I showed them how not to fear the core. I did get one question about using the PowerShell ISE on the core. I’m sorry to say, it is not possible. Take a look at the image below.

That is the magical feature that adds the GUI back in. That kind of ruins the reason why you deployed a core in the first place. Here is an alternative. Take a look at this icon on the PowerShell ISE.

Let the ISE know which computer you want to remote into.

Provide credentials for PowerShell remoting.

You will get a new tab for that remote server.

Now you are using the ISE on the core, but you do not need to install the GUI on the core to do it. Have fun!